"Lanny DeVaney" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> OK, I'll start pulling this info together.
>
> Let's see ...
>
> I'll send you an lspci output, and as soon as I get around to pulling the
> cover off one of these machines, I'll get you the flash part info.
>
> One oddity, the Gigabyte GA-60XE motherboard uses something they call a
> "dual BIOS", where you have a "backup" to use if something goes wrong.
>
> Some URLs:
>
> Intel 815EP chipset http://developer.intel.com/design/chipsets/815ep/
>
> Gigabyte GA-60XE motherboard http://www.giga-byte.com/products/6oxe.htm
> (this includes a link to the hardware manual, as well, in pdf)
>
> The vendor seems concerned with the diffuculty this task will present. Can
> anyone offer any suggestions for answering these questions/concerns?
The hardest part of linuxBIOS is generally getting the documentation.
Beyond that the code for every thing is straight forward but
relatively time consuming because you are working a very low level.
> - will they need source code from the original BIOS?
You shouldn't. It might help, but then again it's probably useless
mess all in assembly.
> - is there something along the lines of a HOWTO for porting LinuxBIOS, or
> something detailing the steps?
Not yet unfortunantely.
I would budget at least a month for porting linuxBIOS and bringing it up
to something that resembles working. And another month to get the worst
of the bugs out to make it useable. Then some more time for getting
all of the bugs iron out of the deployment.
Plus since you haven't been through the code I'd probably budget some
time for climbing the learning curve.
Bassically the progression I go through is.
1) Figure out how to flash the bios, and how to recover from mistakes.
2) Figure out how to get linuxBIOS to enable the serial port
and disable any watchdog timers.
3) Enable ram.
4) You're finally in C code and it should be just a matter of writing
simple device drivers.
> At the least, could someone take a look at the giga-byte link and make sure
> I'm not completely missing something that would make the porting effort very
> difficult/impossible?
Getting documentation of all of the major components of the Board is
generally the hard part. The P6 cpu and the i815 chipset are well
documented so except for a superI/O chip, and a flash chip you should
be o.k.
If you can flash the BIOS, recover from a failed flash of the BIOS,
and use the serial port for debugging you should be able to make it work.
Eric
